Even if her teachings repeated common admonitions, Craddock’s recasting of married sex as a mystical act proved a consequential shift well beyond the bedroom. The spiritual blessing she bestowed upon sexual satisfaction lined up surprisingly well with the demands of secular liberals for a singularly private version of religion. If the state was to denude itself of all church entanglements and sectarian expressions—as secularists hoped—where better to divert religion’s surplus passions than to the marriage bed? That boudoir piety was effectively designed to channel religion away from the public realm to the innermost sanctum of the domestic sphere. Comstock’s Christian America, with all its snooping into public morals, would be replaced with hearty secular notions of free expression, individual liberty, and protected privacy. Making religion and sex private affairs—in effect, putting the two together behind closed doors—Craddock attempted to liberalize sexuality through redrawing religion’s bounds. Privacy would be a shelter for both religious liberty and sexual enlightenment.4
CRADDOCK’S INITIAL DEDICATION to the cause of sex education flowed through the notorious editor Moses Harman, a firebrand of social reform who had begun his career in Missouri in the 1850s as a hobbled schoolteacher turned circuit-riding Methodist preacher. Leaving the evangelical ministry to pursue freethinking anticlericalism, Harman boasted an intellectual and religious pilgrimage almost as jagged as Craddock’s own. By 1879, he had settled in Valley Falls, Kansas; then a widower with two children and little means, Harman was intent on becoming a local agitator for the National Liberal League against Protestant efforts to make the United States an avowedly Christian nation.
As was the case for other defenders of secularism, Harman was spurred to action by the perceived threat that evangelical initiatives posed to the country’s liberties. Comstock’s anti-obscenity crusade, along with the National Reform Association’s proposal to put God and Jesus in the Constitution, galvanized Harman to build up midwestern connections for the Liberal Leaguers. Looking to safeguard the land from further Protestant encroachments, Harman started the Valley Falls Liberal in 1880, which evolved the next year into the Kansas Liberal and in August 1883 into Lucifer the Light-Bearer. That sardonic title—a rebellious blast at the biblical God who had, Harman claimed, doomed humanity to “perpetual ignorance” through his unfortunate response to Adam and Eve when they ate from the tree of knowledge—was enough to indicate where the journal was headed. Lucifer the Light-Bearer quickly emerged as one of the great mastheads of radical dissent and would remain an influential force for the next two decades. A diehard proponent of the liberal demands of the American Secular Union, Harman expanded that church-state agenda to include populist economic reforms and women’s rights. Above all, he extended the liberal cause to include the transformation of love, marriage, and sexuality.5
Its critics always caricatured Free Love as a free-lust movement, but its bedrock was marriage reform, not pleasure-seeking. It wished marital relations to be free of all coercion, and for no husband to have the power to impose his sexual demands upon his wife. Pure love, not legal restraint or social convention, was to be the basis of any genuine union between husband and wife. Harman took those durable Free-Love propositions and gave them startlingly forthright expression. Plainspoken and blunt by principle, Harman acquired an especially sleazy reputation when he published correspondence from a Tennessee radical, W. G. Markland, in 1886. “If a man stabs his wife to death with a knife,” the Markland letter asked, “does not the law hold him for murder? If he murders her with his penis, what does the law do? . . . Can a Czar have more absolute power over a subject than a man has over the genitals of his wife?” That “awful” communication got Harman indicted on obscenity charges in early 1887, the subsequent trial and conviction for which helped transform him into a freedom-of-the-press icon. Doing jail time was no lightweight burden, but being taken down by Comstock definitely made for a certain celebrity in liberal circles.
Moses Harman, an especially daring publisher among nineteenth-century marriage reformers, provided Craddock with recurrent backing and publicity in his journal Lucifer the Light-Bearer . Harman, already a graybeard among sex radicals by the time Craddock came on the scene, is pictured here with one of his grandchildren. WHi-65507, Wisconsin Historical Society.
Harman was notorious for more than his publishing ventures. Coincident with the Markland episode, Harman had also created outrage for solemnizing the Free-Love union of his daughter Lillian and fellow agitator Edwin C. Walker, a voluntary coupling that disregarded both civil and ecclesial norms and looked to its critics like nothing more than “illicit cohabitation.” After that notorious ceremony and his initial arrest, Harman was perpetually enmeshed in interconnected legal battles for free speech and marriage reform. The editor of Lucifer clearly had a knack for scandal, but most of the commotion he generated came from tenaciously asserting the fundamental question: “Has freedom gender?” Or, as he answered the question in his own attempt at a liberal credo, “Freedom that is not equal is not freedom.”6
Craddock was much indebted to Harman’s rabblerousing journalism for initial notice and ongoing support. Presenting Craddock’s unusual defense of belly dancing to his readers in late 1893, Harman hailed the piece as her coming out “among the radical thinkers and agitators of the social revolution,” those “fearless investigators” of women’s chronic inequalities within “our so-called civilized society.” Craddock’s essay offered just the kind of iconoclastic thinking that appealed to Harman, but what made it even better was that it flew in the face of his own arch-nemesis, Anthony Comstock. In a head-note Harman first introduced Craddock to his readers as the former secretary of the American Secular Union, effectively highlighting her alliance with him as a fellow Liberal Leaguer, but then he immediately pivoted to point out how much the performance in the Cairo Street Theatre had upset Comstock, “the American censor of morals.” From there he let Craddock speak for herself on “those old uplifting days of Phallic or Sex Worship” and on belly dancing as an unexpected means of grace.
Precisely because Craddock’s theories could seem so outlandish, Harman delighted in lending them public support and visibility. Her arguments on behalf of belly dancing might “shock or repel the average reader,” the editor of Lucifer admitted, but he clearly did not give a damn about that. Despite his having already served time in the state penitentiary for his paper’s obscenities, Harman happily presented Craddock’s essay as a model of reasonableness and purity. A few years later he would admit that he found her rather “superstitious” about the “sacredness” of marriage and too given to “speculative theology” for his rationalist frame of mind, but he always remained enamored with her “lofty courage.” Indeed, after the journal and its editorial cadre moved to Chicago in the late 1890s, Harman invited Craddock to lecture twice in his own home, and his daughter Lillian (the infamous cohabitator) even showed up to support Craddock’s Church of Yoga meetings.7
Craddock’s debut in Lucifer the Light-Bearer aligned her with Harman’s Free-Love rebellion against “sex slavery,” but the essay itself actually pointed more directly to her debt to utopian John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Oneida Community. Noyes, a Vermont preacher whose Yale theological education had been cut short after he made a wild-eyed claim to sinless purity, was an imposing visionary in search of social and religious perfection. Like so many other Americans of his era—Bronson Alcott at Fruitlands and George Ripley at Brook Farm were only two of the more famous—Noyes turned to a communitarian experiment for the fulfillment of his quest. Organized in 1848, his Bible-based commune endured until 1879 and proved one of the most influential of the era, particularly in its role as a crucible for sexual and marital innovations. In an industrializing economy that seemed to drive an ever-sharper distinction between work and home as well as between the roles of men and women, new religious communities became especially important places to test alternative social adjustments of family life. The Shakers tried celibacy and orp
han adoptions; the Mormons embraced “plural marriage” and a restored patriarchal order; and the Oneida Community, under Noyes’s autocratic direction, experimented with a distinct version of perfectionist sex.8
Craddock herself had no personal connection to Oneida, but she nonetheless looked to Noyes for inspiration on how to improve American marriages. She explicitly embraced his emphasis on coitus reservatus or “male continence,” a practice that was seen as both a means of contraception and a way to prolong the sexual encounter to the woman’s advantage. While Craddock had no interest in the side of Noyes’s experimental regimen that included a variety of sexual partners, she very much followed him on disjoining the “amative” joys of sex from their “propagative” consequences. With birth-control devices relatively unreliable and shadowed by legal strictures, many nineteenth-century reformers adopted the disciplined retention of semen as a more satisfying preventive than abstinence. “Male continence,” in the parlance Craddock borrowed from Noyes, was offered as a good method by which married couples could have many of the delights of physical intimacy, while minimizing the possibility of unwanted pregnancy. Noyes, like Craddock after him, took sex to be “an act of communion,” and that sacramental blessing was separable from sex as “an act of propagation.” Noyes had included only those in his small and carefully regulated community in his quest to tap into the spirituality of sexual intercourse, but Craddock stood ready to invite all married couples to join in this new communion.9
Craddock was far from alone in the 1890s in promoting Noyes’s teachings under new banners. The nephew of Oneida’s founder, George Noyes Miller, who was raised in the community and who helped launch its famed line of silver-plated tableware, promoted his uncle’s birth-control technique in the novelistic After the Sex Struck; Or, Zugassent’s Discovery (1895). Miller’s fictitious character Immanuel Zugassent, like Craddock, offered a relatively tame, monogamous version of male continence through which married couples were able “to subject human propagation to the control of reason.” “Zugassent’s wonderful Discovery,” Miller effused, would release women from the “treadmill” of reproduction and would serve “as a splendid stimulus to [the] spirituality” of both partners. Likewise, another Oneida-inspired disciple, Albert Chavannes, encouraged this form of sexual self-control under the heading “the philosophy of Magnetation.” A Knoxville businessman, he spent much of his time pondering his favored subjects of theology, socialism, and sex—and publishing upon them in his own journal the Modern Philosopher.10
Craddock drew on the work of Noyes, Miller, and Chavannes as evidence for the contraceptive effectiveness and religious desirability of male continence. While she initially favored John Humphrey Noyes’s nomenclature, she shifted smoothly between the period’s varied designations for coitus reservatus. When Craddock eventually placed the practice of male continence under a yogic banner, she was not conceiving a Tantric novelty, but instead performing her own fanciful re-labeling of these homegrown American teachings on sexual control and spiritual communion.
The advocate of male continence with whom Craddock most clearly aligned herself was Alice B. Stockham, author of Tokology: A Book for Every Woman (1886) and Karezza: Ethics of Marriage (1896). A Midwestern physician whose medical advice on pregnancy and childbirth earned her a national and even international readership, Stockham was a supportive elder for Craddock. A quarter century her senior, Stockham shared Craddock’s enthusiasm for metaphysics and promoted a version of Divine Science through her successful publishing company. Eventually, in June 1905, Comstock’s Society for the Suppression of Vice caught up with Stockham as well; the censors, marking a small subset of her medical writings on married sexuality obscene, significantly damaged her business through hefty fines. Stockham’s association with Craddock certainly did not help with the postal inspectors. Her protégé, whom the aged physician had publicly defended against Comstock, fondly served as a promoter of both Tokology and Karezza, and declared the latter “the best book I know of on this sacred and delicate subject of the right sexual relation of husband and wife.” In that volume Stockham directly replaced the concept of “Male Continence” with that of “Karezza,” a term that she saw as more appropriately inclusive of male and female sexual experience and more evocative of the spiritual exaltation of “love’s appointed consummation.” On mystical religion, marital relations, and sexual expression, Stockham and Craddock very much spoke in the same dialect.11
Physician Alice B. Stockham, a marita advisor and metaphysical speculator, exercised a strong influence on Craddock through her Karezza: Ethics of Marriage (1896). Alice B. Stockham, Tokology: A Book for Every Woman (Chicago: Stockham Publishing, 1891), frontispiece.
The spiritual-sexual idiom that Stockham and Craddock shared between them had much more to it than a rehashing of male continence. Stockham, like most other sex reformers of the day, placed a strong emphasis on improving the human stock through carefully planned pregnancies, limited propagation, and better parenting. That women should have full jurisdiction over their reproductive capacity and that all babies should be “desired and welcome offspring” were twin propositions in the literature aimed at combating “sex slavery.” Without more attention to “pre-natal culture,” without reliable techniques for limiting family size, various social ills—including poverty, delinquency, child abuse, and domestic division—had little chance of being ameliorated. New technologies, from electricity to the telephone, were enlarging “nearly every department of life,” Stockham explained in Karezza, and that same spirit of “revolutionizing discovery” needed to be applied to sexual matters. Whether it was the control of orgasms or pregnancies, Stockham and Craddock saw their teachings as part of the forward march of scientific mastery. The sex instinct, including the Darwinian biology of sexual attraction and selection, was an evolutionary force not to disdain, but to harness for civilization’s advance. The reality that various agents of this sexual enlightenment would eventually endorse quite unenlightened public policies for eugenicist purposes—including forced sterilization of the unfit—had yet to dampen progressive enthusiasms. Aligning sex with science was still seen as all gain.12
Beyond the scientific ambitions for reproductive planning, Stockham and Craddock drew as well on the resources of the “Social Purity” movement. With many reformers of record in its ranks, the Social Purity crusade was a force to reckon with in late nineteenth-century America. Its leaders targeted, among other ills, prostitution, polygamy, venereal disease, and drunkenness; they cast an especially critical eye on the double standard for men and women when it came to premarital and extramarital sexual relations. Men were now to be held to the same benchmarks of purity and piety as women had long been; “a single code of ethics,” Stockham insisted, should govern husband and wife. Suggestive of the overlapping worlds of reform—the ways in which temperance advocates, suffragists, vice crusaders, and sex radicals could all be in bed together on marital ethics—Craddock initially identified herself in her public work as a “Lecturer and Correspondent on Social Purity.” As she saw it, earnest reformers among evangelical “Church-women” and “thinking women among the Liberals” were equally ready to embrace the sanitized sexual ethics embodied in Karezza. Both groups, after all, would be quite happy to see a decline in prostitution, male philandering, and venereal disease. The lingua franca of marriage reform and moral hygiene spanned a broad spectrum: Frances Willard, leader of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and Alice Stockham, metaphysical obstetrician, could speak it fluently—and so could Craddock, yogic spiritualist.13
If Stockham and Craddock both took serious heed of the Social Purity movement, that emphasis nonetheless paled before their religious vision for love and marriage. “Work your passion up into poetry,” Stockham quoted Emerson fondly, using that snippet to present intense sexual expression as a manifestation of the inspired soul. “When the signs of this creative power come throbbing and pulsating into every fibre,” Stockham averred, “it only shows tha
t one has greater ability to create than ever before.” The poetry of “sex energy” reached its peak only when it entered the realm of the spirit; transcendental aspirations, in Stockham’s view, necessarily led the way in improving married sexual relations. “Religion and philosophy are required in consecrating passion,” Stockham insisted. For its most exalted expression, coitus had to produce “true soul union,” “a union of the sexes on the spiritual plane.”
The romantic spirituality embodied in Stockham’s Karezza provided an absolutely crucial shift of perspective for those thinking about marital relations at the end of the nineteenth century. Sexual experience was no longer a metaphor for mystical union; it was in itself a form of exquisite religious communion; it created “spiritual exaltation” and opened “visions of a transcendent life.” Married sex was fundamentally a devotional exercise, a sacred relation to be expressed, not a shameful act to be repressed. When fellow radical Lois Waisbrooker spoke of a “sex revolution” in the 1890s, she was hardly imagining a secular strike for women’s rights that jettisoned religion. Indeed, she could not imagine a revolution of this kind without giving it a sacred aura. In these circles, “spiritualized sex” was the sexual revolution. That religious transformation was, without doubt, the sine qua non of Craddock’s own therapeutic efforts; her sexual insurgency depended on this broader transcendental uprising.14
By the turn of the twentieth century, Stockham’s publishing ventures extended well beyond Chicago’s medical and mind-cure circles into a transatlantic company of radicals, poets, and seekers. Nothing suggested those broader currents so much as the alliance that Stockham struck with Edward Carpenter, a British socialist, an ardent admirer of Walt Whitman, a leading critic of modern civilization’s stifling repressiveness, a sandal-wearing vegetarian, and a defender of same-sex love. In 1900 Stockham published the first American edition of Carpenter’s Love’s Coming-of-Age: A Series of Papers on the Relations of the Sexes. It was, all at once, a blast at conventional marriage, a brief for women’s equality, and a blessing of sexual passion.
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